Muddled Syria Policy Is a Product of the Libyan War

With Syria, Obama is behaving in ways that run counter to the decision criteria he applied in Libya. He is committing intelligence and military resources to a crisis that does not have UN Security Council sanction, and he is not framing his response to the chemical weapons use in terms of either punishing the commanders who authorized their use — or to security those weapons. Instead, Obama is joining the rebel forces and committing to a regime change formula that could potentially falter. And that is before calculating the global strategic costs of getting in a nasty stand-off with Russia whose support is needed on other global challenges [bold mine-DL].

This is sloppy interventionism — strategically inchoate, potentially at conflict with other larger and more important U.S. strategic goals, and potentially the kind of commitment that obligates the United States to support a rebellion that America avoided doing in the Libyan case.

Clemons gives the intervention in Libya more credit for coherence and planning than it deserves. The Libyan intervention was in conflict with larger and more important U.S. strategic goals, and it damaged the relationship with Russia, but these things were dismissed as irrelevant at the time. That said, the main problem with the analysis here is that it fails to account for how the administration’s muddled Syria policy is in many respects a product of the decision to intervene in Libya. The Libyan war created false hopes of similar action elsewhere, but it also applied a standard for intervention that the conflict in Syria would not be able to meet. Partly to placate critics at home, the administration emphasized the unique, virtually unrepeatable conditions that made direct intervention in Libya feasible. Because those conditions didn’t and still don’t exist in the Syrian case, there was not going to be the same response to an armed conflict there. However, the Libyan intervention was also justified in the loftiest terms, and the fact that the U.S. had nothing at stake in Libya’s civil war was treated as a virtue. This created expectations that the U.S. would be compelled to take similar action in response to Syria’s conflict, where the U.S. supposedly has more at stake.

Trapped in part by his own rhetoric, Obama nonetheless felt obliged to “speak out” against Assad while the Libyan war was still going on, and ever since then the administration has lurched from one unwise declaration to another. Having made these declarations, he seems to have felt compelled to follow through on them. Obama has also been hemmed in on the other side by the fact that the U.N. authorization that made intervention in Libya technically legal will never be given to an escalated U.S. military role in Syria. Russian and Chinese abstentions on the Libya resolution created an illusion of broad international consensus for the war that never really existed, and now that illusion has since been dispelled. It is also possible that Russia’s abstention in 2011 encouraged the administration to expect similar Russian cooperation on Syria, but if so they failed to take account of Russia’s greater interest in Syria and how displeased Moscow was by the Libyan war.

The Libyan war itself may have created the false impression that U.S. backing would be quickly forthcoming to other anti-regime rebels. On the one hand, the Libyan war was supposed to set a precedent and deter dictators from engaging in brutal repression, which it obviously didn’t do. On the other, it was supposed to be a one-time policy that would not be copied in the future. The Syria policy that has emerged over the last two years is the result of insisting that Libya was a great success that should not be replicated elsewhere.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 13 comments

13 Responses to Muddled Syria Policy Is a Product of the Libyan War

In the wake of the Libya military action, corporate investors poured into Tripoli. Other allies who had joined in support had their own financial elites squealing that they had been excluded from the spoils.

News reports have Israeli government sources clamoring for overthrowing Syria, precisely because that is against Iran’s interests.

When the U.S. supported the same “freedom fighter” elements, in Afghanistan, it was because it was against Soviet interests.

This acting against what is seen as a far greater enemy, a competitive state player, the Soviet Union then, Iran now, is how the U.S. can engage in a 12 year series of wars based on the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda, while pivoting now to assist the self-same Al Qaeda when it is useful to oppose Iranian and Russian strategic interests, under the same AUMF.

“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” – George Orwell

I don’t know how Clemons can keep a straight face while claimong that the United States “avoided supporting a rebellion in Libya” in the first place. The “responsibility to protect” claim was with respect to Ghadaffi’s threat to “exterminate rats” in Benghazi, and that argument lasted only a few days at most. The threat was empty rhetoric, and our purpose was regime change from the beginning, a fact that became apparent on about day two whn Obama said that we would not stop until Ghadaffi was driven from power. If regime change is not “supporting the rebellion,” I would like to know what is.

“…he is not framing his response to the chemical weapons use in terms of either punishing the commanders who authorized their use — or to security those weapons….”

How would Clemons propose that either is possible without direct, massive U.S. military intervention? The rebels can only target what they can reach, and we’re not going to transform them into highly skilled, narrowly focused commando squads whose only concern is to pursue those who use unlawful chemical weapons. The last Pentagon estimate I read for what it would take to secure Syria’s chemical arsenal was “75,000 U.S. ground troops”, and no small part of that effort would be to keep the weapons out of the hands of rebel factions.

James — Yes. Not to be contentious, but that’s pretty much the point I was making. I was refuting the claim made by Clemons that we “avoided backing the rebellion.” Doesn’t “removal of the government” amount to the same thing as “backing the rebellion”?

Both China and Russia believed that a no fly zone meant just that, not the bombing of targets and sending special forces on the ground. Put America in their shoes, you think they would want to be openly deceived like that again ?

The tragedy of this is that the President is probably doing the least he thinks he can get away with in the face of a hostile Village, and military/intelligence complex. Like LBJ in Vietnam, he allows himself to be moved along (and thus unleash forces he can’t control) in (vain) hopes of buying leverage for his domestic agenda.

Fran, I have a question to ask you with complete respect. I asked this same question on another thread, but the post is an older one and you may not see it.

Are there circumstances under which you would judge fighting or defense as justifiable? This is a larger question than just the topic of this article, but I’ve seen a number of your comments concerning war in threads on TAC. If you would see defense, war, etc., as justifiable in rare cases, what would they be. I ask that you answer this question only if you wish to do so. Thank you very much.

President Obama’s incompetence has finally caught up with him. After the ongoing scandals, who outside his sycophants believes what he says any more. I’m still galled by his putting US prestige on the line by the use of a ‘red line’ regarding chemical weapons use in Syria. So now we are at a standoff with Russia because Obama does not want to lose face. What a way to run foreign policy. Even in his second term it is still amateur hour.

James – “ONe wonders if Obama saw that “protecting civilians” would morph almost immediately into demanding the Libyan government abandon power?”

Are you serious? Obama’s agenda was regime change from the beginning. “Responsibility to protect” was never anything more than a pretense. At best it was cant used by Samantha Power and Susan Rice to provide him with a plausible reason which would get him off of dead center and coerce him to act, something that he does only when his hand is forced.